The last time Matthew fought a monster capable of true thought and self-awareness, it cost him an eye and a dear friend’s life.

  So he didn’t take any risks with this one. His hand reached out to pull back his eyepatch and unleash the black hole hidden underneath. He would send the monster to join its home Dungeon into nothingness.

  The newly christened Tarantulas immediately leaped off the ceiling. Matthew thought the monster would target him, but it instead aimed straight for John while powering through the bullets shot its way. John barely had time to roll out of Tarantulas’ trajectory as it crash-landed onto the floor.

  Matthew turned to face the monster, only for its spindly limbs to carry it away in a flash of speed. Tarantulas crawled closer to John in a way that placed the gunman between Matthew and itself.

  “Pull back!” Matthew shouted to John as he ran to the side in an attempt to pull Tarantulas into his direct line of sight. The monster hastily remained on the move to keep John in-between them, then opened its skeletal maw to reveal a biomechanical muzzle hidden within. An organic bullet projectile of some kind flew straight at Matthew’s head, which he barely managed to dodge thanks to his Doom Sense and Peak spells combining to move his body out of the way. The shot hit the wall behind him with enough strength to pulverize stone.

  While Kari followed Matthew’s order and grabbed throwing knives from her bag to harass the monster from afar, John struggled with keeping his distance. His charged bullets not only struggled to break through Tarantulas’ biomechanical armor, but the monster expanded its spider-limbs like telescopic tentacles in an attempt to catch him. John was forced to remain constantly on the move, and most importantly, within Matthew’s line of sight.

  The bug remembers. Matthew angrily pulled his eyepatch back on for fear of accidentally swallowing John too. Damn it! It remembers how I destroyed its Dungeon the first time around, and it knows I won’t harm my teammates!

  “Matt, cover me!” Kari shouted as she switched tactics and engaged Tarantulas in close combat to relieve John. Matthew switched to targeting the monster’s spider-legs with his finger-guns and successfully opened tiny holes along the joints. Thick green blood poured out of the wounds, and the monster let out a chittering shriek akin to a loud radio static.

  Seeing Kari’s approach, Tarantulas fired at her with its muzzle, but the Crawler proved quicker and swiftly struck at him in melee. Kari’s rapier struck a cable-vein between the head and the neck before following through with several thrusts in an attempt to find a weak spot. Tarantulas shifted its posture to stand on its two humanoid legs and use its longer, spider-like limbs to sweep Kari away. The Crawler deftly dodged each and every strike in a sword dance which Matthew could only call magnificent.

  Tarantulas’ artificial eyes whirred and a blue pulse erupted from its biomechanical flesh.

  A translucent, azure sphere of Flux swallowed Kari, Matthew, John, and most of the room in an instant. Kari’s latest thrust missed as Tarantulas dodged at the last second, her sword hitting only empty air. Matthew attempted to support her with his finger-guns, but Tarantulas shifted its movement pattern in response. The monster twisted its limbs just the right way, tilted its head one side at the last minute, and sidestepped out of Matthew’s firing line. It grew more aggressive too, mixing muzzle-rounds and sweeping limb motions to strike at Kari. She barely had time to dodge one of the former at the last minute with the projectile grazing her cheek close enough to draw blood; a sight which filled Matthew with fear and concern.

  How could this thing anticipate their attacks so well all of a sudden? Did it have something to do with the field of Blue Flux covering the room?

  Matthew’s heart pounded in his chest as he connected the dots. Tarantulas’ spell was rough and imprecise, with the creature wasting so much Blue Flux to power it that it became visible to the naked eye, but Matthew had seen Kari cast that spell often enough to recognize it.

  “Intuimotion…” Matthew muttered under his breath in disbelief. “It’s using Intuimotion!”

  John clenched his jaw as he finished reloading. “This thing can cast spells?!”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The Blue spell Intuimotion allowed the user to gain an acute awareness of all motion within a ten-meter radius, de facto sharpening their reflexes and reaction time. Kari used it all the time in combat to enhance her Key’s increased visual accuracy and bolster her defenses. Did Tarantulas manage to learn it simply by observing her?

  They had to kill this thing now. An independent monster capable of learning and duplicating spells was simply too much of an existential threat.

  “Kari, back off!” Matthew shouted as he pressed his hand against the ground, with his teammate immediately retreating. Tarantulas grabbed a fragment of the broken dais nearby and threw it across the room at Matthew with blinding velocity. His Peak and Doom Sense spells once again combined to let him lower his head just in time to avoid a deadly blow.

  His hand touched the floor and immediately opened a hole inside it. Matthew quickly directed its expanding oval shape in Tarantulas’ direction. The hole grew to swallow the dais’ remains and expose the pantry rooms below, with Kari barely managing to leap to the edge for safety.

  Intuimotion gave its user a supernatural awareness of all movements within its radius, but knowing an attack was coming wasn’t the same as being capable of dodging it. Matthew and John practiced often enough with Kari to identify that weakness.

  Tarantulas’ lack of practice led the monster to leap away towards the ceiling in an attempt to escape the growing hole; a fatal mistake which John exploited by firing a few rounds at it. The monster spun in midair to dodge, and it would have succeeded… had not John used his power to redirect the bullets straight into Tarantulas’ face.

  The rounds exploded in a surge of fire and light.

  The blast incinerated Tarantulas’ left eye and propelled the monster back across the room. It hit the hole’s edge right next to a cracked window and barely managed to regain its footing. Half its visage melted away, with thick vein cables and metal bones gleaming beneath the searing burns and his Intuimotion spell collapsing on itself in an instant.

  “Incendiary bullets,” John explained while quickly reloading. “More flashy than effective.”

  “Is that Geneva compatible?” Matthew asked with a cruel smirk.

  “What are you talking about, Maruki?” John aimed at Tarantulas’ face. “Geneva never existed.”

  The creature glared at them with its remaining eye, with Matthew expecting it to fire at them with its muzzle. To his surprise, the monster instead chose to address them with a metallic, inhuman voice.

  “Why?” it asked with a flat, emotionless tone. “Why, why, why?”

  “‘Cause you killed our friends,” Matthew replied coldly as he pointed at the monster with a finger-gun.

  “Friends?” The monster’s head tilted to the side like that of a curious bird. “Friends is not… you?”

  Matthew answered by aiming at the monster’s head with a finger-gun. John fired a few rounds at the same time, his bullets leaving a crimson bloody streak in their wake.

  Tarantulas fired back as it leaped through the cracked window. Matthew’s defensive spells forced his body to move out of the projectile’s way and threw off his aim, his bullet holes opening on glass shards rather than in the monster’s heart. Some of John’s projectiles hit true, though Matthew couldn’t tell how much damage they inflicted. Tarantulas fell onto the courtyard outside beyond his view.

  “It…” Kari choked in surprise and rushed along the floor hole’s edge to reach out for the window. “It ran away?!”

  Monsters never retreated, because they had no sense of self-preservation. They were an extension of a Dungeon’s will and were meant to die fighting to the bitter end. When given the choice, they always tried to kill humans to feed their Dungeon. This creature’s actions could only mean one thing.

  It had a survival instinct.

  “It’s fleeing into the toilets!” Kari shouted after taking a look outside. “It’s going after the hostages!”

  That would be the most logical assumption, if that monster were a native from this Dungeon and eager to feed it... but Tarantulas was an intruder, a transplant from another place entirely. It had no more loyalty to its current Dungeon than a squatter for a cardboard box.

  Matthew’s heart skipped a beat in his chest. “It’s not going after the hostages,” he said as he rushed towards the door. “It’s running for the exit! It’s trying to flee the Dungeon!”

  If it survived the loss of its first home long enough to take refuge in another, then it could do it again.

  Matthew saw a flash of disbelief in his teammates’ eyes, but they both followed his lead nonetheless. The trio rushed down the stairs leading to the courtyard and then back into the first floor’s storerooms in a desperate attempt to catch the escaping monster. They ran into the kitchen to see damaged animatronic waiters struggling to pick back up their severed limbs or blasted arms. Tarantulas had been no more friendly to the local monsters unlucky enough to stand in its way than to human visitors

  “The standby team is on its way,” Crypto said on the other end of the navigator line. “Priority is capturing or neutralizing that monster. If it can think, it can learn.”

  Like the thing in the Mall.

  Matthew’s team rushed into the restaurant near the entrance to find its customers unharmed and too absorbed in their own meals to care about anything else. Only once they reached the fry moat did they briefly pause in horror.

  The gate to the exit stood wide open.

  A monster now roamed outside a Dungeon.

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